Last week I made a couple of passing references to the Chicago International Film Festival’s lack of clout in acquiring what many of my colleagues and I believe are the most important foreign movies to have appeared this year, including Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Rosetta, Raul Ruiz’s Time Regained, and Claire Denis’ Le beau travail. Of course some colleagues–in particular ones who favor strong, easy to follow story lines over form, style, even vision–don’t consider these pictures important, but my excitement about them is shared by many people in the mainstream: Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum singled out the Kiarostami and Denis movies as major Toronto events, in print and on Roger Ebert’s TV show; Rosetta won the top prize at Cannes; and the New Yorker devoted a small spread to the star-studded Time Regained three months back.
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Rosetta and Le beau travail have acquired U.S. distributors. So far The Wind Will Carry Us and Time Regained haven’t–yet their producers are every bit as resistant to Chicago festival screenings as the distributor of Rosetta. Why? Because if a distributor or potential distributor is already worried about how many viewers a movie will attract, it won’t help to siphon off a few hundred of them at festival screenings. Of course screenings in Toronto are an exception (though for reasons that are still unclear, Ruiz’s Proust adaptation wasn’t shown there). The largest annual film event in North America, attended by thousands of film-industry people as well as the general public, Toronto gets massive press coverage, so any film that’s shown there is automatically guaranteed a lot of attention. The New York film festival is also an exception (it’s showing all my favorites apart from the Kiarostami, which the selection committee couldn’t preview in time); it restricts itself to 26 features, guaranteeing that each program will be paid a lot of attention–far more than the 118 programs of the Chicago Film Festival.
This is the week the real deluge begins, and the task of choosing between selections becomes much harder. At some peak hours there are as many as eight separate programs playing at once, in two separate parts of town, and even though many of these programs will be repeated, some of them more than once, getting to everything you want to see may be difficult. The profusion of reviews below is designed to make choosing a little easier.
